Where I Was From: On Second Thought

By THOMAS MALLON

Published: September 28, 2003

Joan Didion, who will turn 70 next year, belongs to that minority of Americans for whom, in the telling of family history, the ''crossing'' refers to an overland journey and not an ocean voyage. Didion's early fiction and landmark first essay collection, ''Slouching Towards Bethlehem'' (1968), drew frequent attention to her descent from pioneers, and her new book, ''Where I Was From,'' reminds us that in 1846 some of her forebears traveled part of their way west with the doomed and eventually cannibalistic Donner party.

The women in Didion's family lived ''without much time for second thoughts, without much inclination toward equivocation.'' Didion herself became a writer so famously distrustful of abstraction that the skeptical quotation marks she liked to put around all but the commonest of nouns constituted an important element in one of the most recognizable -- and brilliant -- literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades.

In contrast to those female ancestors, this new book of Didion's is full of second thoughts: about the Sacramento Valley of her childhood and, finally, the whole history of California. What we get is a darker view of the ''crossing'' than this writer has presented before, one in which its supposed ''redemptive power'' has pretty much vanished. The emphasis is now on futility, not heroism, more on chicanery and self-delusion than the self-respect she once said her ancestors ''knew all about.'' Her title is strictly accurate; this is a reconsideration of a place, not the conventional memoir of a person. The book's autobiographical aspect is intellectual and moral, an attempt to account for what Didion now sees as the ''strikingly unearned'' pride she and her family took in California and their early arrival there.

Some of this volume's material first appeared a decade ago in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, but it has been reshaped to an effect that seems not at all miscellaneous. This ''exploration into my own confusions'' becomes a connected argument and, sometimes quite directly, a fascinating gloss on Didion's own earlier writings. If its very doubts sometimes themselves seem dubious, the book nevertheless feels like a fresh departure, something that will be appreciated especially by longtime admirers who have been disappointed in the paucity and repetitions of her more recent work.

Didion is these days trying to rid herself of the sense that there used to be ''true'' Californians who were overwhelmed by later, particularly postwar, arrivals -- the ones who brought with them, or created, what she called in ''Slouching Towards Bethlehem'' ''the flotsam of the New California.'' Beginning a scholarly quest for a different understanding of her home state, Didion is distressed to find herself quoted, twice, in a recent history book on just that subject. She accomplishes her revisionism only with the help of much older texts, like Charles Nordhoff's ''Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands'' (1874), Josiah Royce's ''California: A Study of American Character'' (1886) and Frank Norris's novel ''The Octopus'' (1901), which she now views not as a blunderbuss of naturalism but as ''a deeply ambiguous work'' in which the octopus is nature itself (not the railroad, as people usually remember) and the wheat ranchers are ''farmers with tickers in their offices,'' speculators more in love with the score than the land -- and thereby, in Didion's current view, truer to the state's ethos than those Californians she used to accept as ''true.''

As the author now sees it, the state's history is all of a piece, a saga always advanced with ''somebody else's money,'' chiefly the federal government's, ''spent on behalf of a broad spectrum of business interests'' -- enough of it to build the railroads; to flood the Sacramento Valley into a wondrously unnatural fertility (''a vast agricultural mechanism in a kind of market vacuum''); and to dapple the southern part of the state with a vast patchwork of modern suburbs centered on the defense and aerospace industries. The residents of those subdivisions became merely the latest ''artificial ownership class'' in the state's dependent history.

The individualists and buccaneers who used to excite this author's attentive admiration now seem more like a weary succession of itinerants on the public dole. The whole human presence in California has begun to feel like such a fiasco to Didion that she finds the people-banishing poems of Big Sur's Robinson Jeffers (''When the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains'') starting to make ''fatally seductive sense.''

It now appears to Didion that Californians never really practiced the sort of personal responsibility, the ''wagon-train morality,'' that she extolled almost 40 years ago. ''Where I Was From'' impeaches the sworn collective belief that the state's citizens ''were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving.'' In fact, Didion now argues, California has always been a republic of buck-passers who let someone else kill the snake after they had managed to get out of its way. She remembers how, as a young woman, she herself, seeing a rattlesnake in the cemetery her family used to own, ''failed to get out of the car and kill it'' -- the same way her mother never killed the copperhead that slithered near Didion's brother's playpen.